Lifeboat Foundation

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Iris scanners are helping Syrian refugees get food faster and more easily.

Minimum wage for a robot? $0/hour. Maximum wage? $0/hour.

(From Fox)

Eatsa, the mostly automated healthy, fast food bowl shop based in San Francisco, has inspired the CEO of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s to rethink the traditional workforce—by replacing all humans with robots.

Continue reading “Carl’s Jr CEO wants to replace all human workers with robots” »

The fast-food retailer built the droid with Australian startup Marathon Robotics using a robot sourced from the military and its own technology, including Domino’s GPS tracking data.

DRU, which could spell the beginning of the end of the pizza delivery boy, has a sensory system that uses lasers to move around obstacles in its path to travel unassisted to a customer’s address.

The four-wheeled robotic unit travels up to speeds of 20km/h and is designed to cruise on footpaths, trails and bike paths.

Continue reading “Domino’s unveil ‘world’s first’ pizza delivery robot” »

Specifically, artificially intelligent computers…

As sophisticated algorithms can complete tasks we once thought impossible, computers are seeming to become a real threat to humanity. Whether they decide to pulp us into human meat paste, or simply make our work completely unnecessary, argues technology reporter Alex Hern, we should be afraid of computers.

Cape Coral, FL-based Ecological Laboratories Inc. has received organic certification for Quantum Light, its flagship beneficial bacteria product specifically formulated to improve soil biodiversity and increase crop yields. With this certification, Ecological can now support the rapidly growing organic farming and lawn care markets with its all-natural product technologies.

“Our objective continues to be the development of products focused on improving crop yields which at the same time contribute to the protection of farms, and the land and water surrounding them,” said Alan Schatten, chief operating officer of Ecological. “This certification is the first of many steps we intend to take to further our mission.”

“Our technology platform, which has been used to solve environmental problems worldwide for over 40 years, continues to grow and improve,” said Delvia Lukito, assistant vice president of research, development and laboratory operations. “Our team will continue to focus its efforts on developing products to support the good work being carried out by the organic farming community.”

Continue reading “Soil Biodiversity Product Earns Organic Certification” »

ARPA-E creating sustainable energy crops for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass.

In Washington, the DOE’s ARPA-E TERRA projects seek to accelerate the development of sustainable energy crops for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass. To accomplish this, the projects uniquely integrate agriculture, information technology, and engineering communities to design and apply new tools for the development of improved varieties of energy sorghum. The TERRA project teams will create novel platforms to enhance methods for crop phenotyping (identifying and measuring the physical characteristics of plants) which are currently time-intensive and imprecise.

The new approaches will include automated methods for observing and recording characteristics of plants and advanced algorithms for analyzing data and predicting plant growth potential. The projects will also produce a large public database of sorghum genotypes, enabling the greater community of plant physiologists,

Bioinformaticians and geneticists to generate breakthroughs beyond TERRA. These innovations will accelerate the annual yield gains of traditional plant breeding and support the discovery of new crop traits that improve water productivity and nutrient use efficiency needed to improve the sustainability of bioenergy crops.

Continue reading “DOE’s ARPA-E TERRA projects seek to accelerate sustainable energy crop development” »

Eat plenty of “real” pure Maple Syrup from VT or Maine; and reduce Alzheimers.

Alzheimer’s prevention may be closer — and tastier.

Unlike any other life on Earth, these extraordinary bacteria use energy in its purest form – they eat and breathe electrons – and they are everywhere.

Continue reading “Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy” »